Pestered by boys for porn-style sex, it’s no wonder girls want to be non-binary

In 1989, when the Tavistock Clinic opened its Gender Identity Service it treated fewer than 10 people each year, the majority of whom were males with a long history of what Dr Hilary Cass in her recent report calls “gender distress”. In 2009, it treated 15 adolescent girls and in 2016 that figure had increased exponentially to 1,071.

Now whatever your views on this whole area – and personally I am a trans-ally – the enormous increase in young girls wanting to transition is a phenomenon worthy of investigation. As the mother of two daughters – aged 18 and 21 – I have had a front-row seat on what it is like to be a Gen Z teenage girl. It’s no picnic. There is much media tutting about “snowflakes” – but Gen Z are not making up their mental health issues. This isn’t just overdiagnosis, it’s real. This cohort is more anxious, distressed and seriously mentally unwell than any cohort ever; it’s endemic.

Why? Well, let’s think. I breast-fed my eldest while watching the shock and awe bombing of Baghdad; 7/7 happened just weeks after I brought my youngest home from hospital. As small children they witnessed a global financial meltdown, grew up with a drum beat of climate catastrophe culminating in the pandemic. They were the first cohort to load Instagram on to their phones as tweens – their developing brains overloaded with a tsunami of unreachable perfection. And most pertinently to me – and to Dr Cass, who insists that we look at the broader mental health context in regard to the increase in gender distress for this generation – these are the first girls to grow up against a backdrop of free, instantly clickable internet pornography.

I first wrote about the dangers of a generation of young people growing up with a smorgasbord of violent internet porn at their fingertips over a decade ago in a magazine cover story titled “Generation XXX”. I spoke to teens who, having learnt about sex from porn, were enacting on each other what had until then been nonmainstream acts. I was no nun as a young woman – but no boy ever tried to choke me or bruise me during sex. Nor was anal sex anywhere on the menu. But a decade of freely available porn has shifted the sexual dial to extreme. Everyone from the NSPCC to Ofsted now reports an epidemic of teen sexual violence.

I go into schools to talk to sixth-formers about internet porn and how it has changed the landscape. I ask the teenagers I talk to to raise their hands if they have been choked during “getting with”. Nearly all the girls have. Young men have their sexual dial set to extreme often before they have even kissed a real girl.

In the 1970s women were told they could be whatever they wished to be. In the 1980s and early 1990s, rave culture clothing was much more androgynous – we all wore tracksuit bottoms, trainers and hoodies, or jeans and cowboy boots.

But Gen Z were raised in a much more gendered world: pink fairy dresses and ballet for girls; gaming, comics, bulldozers and Action Man for boys. The girls I knew as children who were more interested in climbing trees or playing computer games are now, more often than not, describing themselves as “non-binary” – which means they don’t identify as either of the current extreme gender norms. They just want to be free to be themselves. These are the ones who often take a they/ them pronoun. They are trying to escape the prevailing hegemony of performative gender – and I don’t blame them. It saddens me that the pursuit of female equality has resulted not in a world in which gender ceases to matter, but one in which it is more pronounced and performative than ever.

These days if a person becomes non-binary to opt out of the porn arms race, their rejection of over-sexualised, pornified versions of female-ness can lead them into a space where discussion of transitioning – particularly in social media echo chambers – can feel like the obvious next step.

The Cass Report found that many of the young people seeking treatment had complex mental health needs – with an overindexing of anxiety, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and autism. This vulnerability makes them susceptible to new kinds of groupthink. And the extremism around the whole gender issue – particularly online – has meant the camps are so polarised that it is difficult to have nuanced and complex conversations. Yet a safe space to explore all of this is urgently needed.

At one school a group of gay and non-binary students talked about how for their cisgendered classmates porn was a problem, because they thought that was the kind of sex they were supposed to be having and many of the girls found the prospect scary. While for this group, who were mainly in same-sex relationships and intentionally rejecting current gender stereotypes, the sexual landscape was much more free: “We just don’t have the same sense of how it is supposed to be, what it is supposed to look like. We feel more free to experiment, just be ourselves and work out what feels good.”

That for me is the crux of why so many girls are transitioning. They have grown up in a world of performative femininity, pestered by their male peers for porn-style sex, objectified and then seen as “vanilla” and “uncool” if they’re not up for the full porn-shebang. Often this is wrapped up in “sex-positive, my body, my choice” rhetoric which has normalised painful sex for women. In a porn-warped culture, deciding not to be a young woman feels like a sensible and self-protective alternative – and, of course, many young people genuinely feel they have been born into the wrong body. That their physicality is not who they really are.

This sense is as old as time and found all over the world from Samoa to Greek myths.

We oldies need to take a deep breath and realise that the world has changed. The young people I know who have changed gender (and yes, this is usually woman to man) seem happier in their new incarnation. Their friends accept it – the whole concept of sexual identity and desire and how people define themselves is just much more fluid for Gen Z. And why not?

I’ve found that all it takes to become a trans-ally is to know and love a trans person. It is hard to transition. Many suffer physically and mentally. It is hard to tell your world you are now John, not Jane. But it’s amazing how quickly it becomes normal for everyone concerned.

The bigger issue is a world where unfettered access to porn and social media is making our children so unhappy. Gen Z are guinea pigs in the online frenzy – it hasn’t served them well. I’m glad moves are now afoot to limit the exposure of young people to an online world which they cannot digest when they are so young. Fix that and maybe girlhood will get a reprieve.

Young men have their sexual dial set to extreme before they’ve even kissed a real girl